Month: September 2015

Interdisciplinarity is something of a buzz-word in academia at the minute. In universities across the UK disciplinary boundaries are becoming increasingly porous, with multiple institutions setting up hubs and programmes designed to encourage cross-faculty interaction. To use just two examples from my own field (besides TORCH at Oxford), Nottingham University has set up a Centre... Continue Reading →

Bacc for the Future is a multi-organisation campaign to prevent the EBacc (English Baccalaureate) from becoming a compulsory performance measure in state schools, proposed by schools minister Nick Gibb in June of this year. I spoke to one of the campaign co-ordinators, Henry Vann, about what the EBacc means for schools, why he believes it is detrimental to secondary education, and what impact its introduction has had on the study of creative subjects.

What is the Bacc for the Future campaign?

It is a cross-arts coalition campaign involving the creative industries, businesses, education organisations and the subject representatives from music, drama, art, design and technology, dance etc. They have all come together to challenge the government’s plan to make the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) compulsory for all secondary school pupils. The key thing from our perspective is that we have been through this before, in a previous version — back in…

Benedict Cumberbatch’s appearance as Hamlet has reached unbelievable levels of hype. It has become the fastest selling play in British history, and fans have flown from overseas and queued for days outside the Barbican on the off chance of securing tickets. Critics have responded with no less hysteria than audiences, with Hamlet remaining front-page news in recent weeks. Both denounced as ‘Shakespeare for kids’ and hailed as ‘surprisingly challenging’, it seemed that this production was doomed to be subsumed by the furore that surrounded it. How could it possibly live up to the expectations placed upon it?

I needn’t have worried. The entire cast and production team rose to the challenge, delivering a Hamlet of such surprising depth and subtlety that I was too lost in the performance to consider anybody else’s opinion of it. Director Lyndsey Turner has navigated deftly through one of the most…